Just glue this drilling guide to your control panel and with spray adhesive, drill the holes and then remove it by peeling it off. That’s why the plans include a glue on drilling template. The control panel can be a real pain to drill out accurately. We’ll make a door to cover this in a later step. On the backside we’re leaving a large 14 inch hole.
Now that we’ve routed all of the T-Mold slots we can finish install the panels. Step 7: Install the Front and Back Panels If you’re not going to add T-Mold, you can skip this step. You have to route all of the components before final assembly, otherwise your router won’t reach the internals. I personally love the retro look with T-Molding. This is a completely optional step depending on how you want your finished arcade to look. With step 4 done, assembling the arcade cabinet is almost as easy as legos. You’ll need to adjust your spacing if you go with a thicker or thinner material. In my case I am using 3/4 inch MDF to build my cabinet, so these connectors are inset exactly 3/4 inch. But! This also has another great benefit: No visible nails or screws on the outside of the cabinet that will need filling later! We can take our time and measure everything out, and then glue and brad nail those to the panels. To make it easier, first we lay out 3/4 x 3/4 inch connectors on the panels. However, that would be incredible hard to hold in place during assembly and it would also be difficult to make sure both sides were perfectly aligned and square. To connect the side panels the center panels you could just glue and brad nail them directly together (or use screws or nails). This will reveal two exact copies a mirror of each other. Once your finished with the cut, unclamp the sides and fold them open. Clamp them to a table, and then use your jigsaw to cut them out. The easiest solution would be to use a 14 inch string, with your pencil tied to one end and a nail tied to the other.Ĭut the MDF panel in half and sandwich the left and right panels together. I made one out of nothing but a 14 inch piece of scrap wood and a bolt. Unfortunately the little store bought ones won’t work. You’ll need a compass to make the curves. You only need to draw out one panel, because we will cut both panels at the same time. The first step is to layout the side panels on a sheet of MDF. The Controllers and Buttons for the Bartop ArcadeĬonstructing the RetroPie Bartop Arcade Cabinet Step 1: Layout the Side Panels It will just cost more and take a little longer and in some cases require a few extra add-on components. All of that is possible with the GPIO pins of the Pi.Īll of that being said, most certainly all of this can be accomplished with a PC. Imagine if you get shot in Quake and the marquee flashes or the cabinet vibrates.
There are emulators for the Commodore 64, Amiga, Nintendo, Atari, etc all included.
This means with literally no additional work, you can be playing all kinds of old PC games too. Many other games like Quake, Doom, Duke Nukem 3D and others have free ports to the Raspberry Pi which usually come included in your download of RetroPie.All you have to do is download it and place it on an SD card.
Literally anyone can afford to buy a Raspberry Pi!
Some of you will undoubtedly ask why I would use a Raspberry Pi instead of a full PC, like in my original full-size arcade build.